60 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021
being an Olympian: roaming the diff erent venues
and sitting in the stands to check out unfamiliar
sports or cheer on teammates.
Athletes will also be missing their family sup-
port structure. In March, the Tokyo Organising
Committee banned international fans, including
families of athletes, from attending the Games.
And with a month to go before the opening cer-
emony, offi cials announced that they would allow
domestic spectators at only 50% capacity, with no
more than 10,000 at any venue.
IOC PRESIDENT THOMAS BACH has prom-
ised that the Tokyo Games will be “safe” from
COVID-19. But the reality is there can be no truly
“safe” Olympics, only a “safer” one. Experts agree
there are no zero-risk scenarios. Yet the actual
risk—to athletes, Japanese citizens and the rest
of the world—has never been properly calculated
or communicated. “As far as I know, there is no
risk- assessment report or result,” says Hitoshi
Oshitani , the virologist who helped devise Japan’s
COVID-19 strategy. “So we do not have any con-
crete material to judge if the risk is acceptable
for Japan and for other countries.” He argues that
only after such an evaluation can a decision be
made about whether it’s safe to hold the Games.
Instead, Tokyo Olympics organizers and Japanese
health offi cials have focused on detection and
containment to make it harder for the virus
to spread among the Olympic community—and
if it does, to pick up cases before they spark clus-
ters or even outbreaks that could spill over into
the local population.
Any athlete, coach or trainer who tests posi-
tive will be immediately placed into isolation in
a designated area in the Olympic Village clinic.
Patients who develop symptoms and require lon-
ger quarantine will move to a hotel dedicated to
COVID-19 cases. And for people who need more
intensive medical care, up to 30 hospitals across
Tokyo stand ready to accept Olympic partici-
pants. However, a spokesperson at St. Luke’s In-
ternational Hospital, which is listed as the medi-
cal center assigned to care for the athletes, says
while it has been approached to coordinate care,
as of late June, “there has been no progress since.”
Some public- health experts say the greatest
danger of spread, however, may come from the
tens of thousands of Japanese citizens who will be
watching the events as spectators. That risk is am-
plifi ed by the increasing prevalence of the Delta
variant—which Japanese health experts predict
could account for half of new infections in the
country by mid-July—because it’s considerably
more contagious and can potentially cause more
severe disease than earlier forms of the virus.
To minimize that threat, Olympic organizers are
enforcing stricter testing and quarantine require-
ments for athletes and team staff arriving from
more than a dozen countries where the Delta vari-
ant is dominant, like India, the U.K. and Malaysia.
While such testing should pick up most cases
of COVID-19 quickly, experience from other large
sports events over the past year, including the
U.S.’s NBA and NFL and the most recent Euro soc-
cer tournament, shows testing won’t be enough.
“From a public- health perspective, we are build-
ing countermeasures based on things we know
work in reducing corona virus infections,” says
Brian McCloskey, who oversaw public- health
services for the London 2012 Olympics and who
now chairs the expert panel advising the IOC on
COVID-19. “Things like social distancing, hand
hygiene and wearing masks are things we know
make a diff erence in reducing spread of the virus.”
Still, even with such carefully planned pre-
vention strategies, viruses have a habit of upend-
ing the best-laid plans, and SARS-CoV-2 is no
exception. “It would be foolish with this virus to
discount the possibility of clusters of cases,” says
McCloskey. “We learned last year that the virus
has a huge capacity to surprise from time to time.”
Disruptions in team lineups, and athletes’ abil-
ity to compete, could plague the Olympics even
if athletes abide by the rules. But Nakamura be-
lieves organizers have strong policies in place
to minimize such occurrences, noting they have
“established rules so that we can trace the virus if
a participant gets infected. I believe such regula-
tions play a role in preventing the Games from be-
coming a superspreader event.”
Convincing the public and the Japanese medi-
cal community of that remains one of the organiz-
ers’ biggest challenges. Nakamura says the IOC
has tried to avoid putting any extra burden on the
Tokyo health care system by not sending Olympic
participants to local testing centers or clinics. But
to do that, the IOC has requested 200 local doc-
tors and 500 nurses to staff Olympic-based sites,
which the chairman of a group representing more
than 100,000 doctors and dentists in Japan said
in May was “almost impossible.” Fewer than 30%
of health care workers in Tokyo are vaccinated,
meaning they might pass along new infections to
their families and communities if they were to get
infected through their Olympic work.
It’s no surprise, then, that health care workers
aren’t jumping at the chance to volunteer for the
Games. One 47-year-old nurse (who asked not to
be named) changed her mind about volunteering
for the Olympics because of her family’s fears that
she might get infected and endanger the healthCARL COURT—GETTY IMAGES
TOKYO
OLYMPICS
BY THE NUMBERS
Number of athletes, staff and media
traveling to Tokyo for the OlympicsShare of Japanese citizens
with at least one vaccine dose7-day average of new cases daily
in Japan, per capita, as of June 307-day average of new cases
daily globally, per capitaShare of athletes expected
to be fully vaccinated